During the last few weekends, I have needed to brush up on my web site parsing skills. The tools available have moved on nicely since my last dip into this topic.
I am currently keeping an eye on properties in Lyon, France. The process has been tedious and called out for some automation. Megan and I plan to return to France in the future and this little project should ease the burden of finding an apartment or house.
Croix-Paquet, Lyon
This morning I discovered the perl module Web::Scraper. It is a port of a Ruby based tool called scrAPI. The approach taken avoids regular expression matching and opts for XPath and DOM tree selector matching; both more resilient methods of addressing specific sections of a web page.
Apartments, Lyon
I found one stumbling block that took a while to overcome. After a little trial and error, I discovered the FireFox browser returned misleading XPaths for objects embedded in tables.
The XPaths provided by FireBug and XPather, included browser-inserted tbody tags. These tags did not appear in my source web pages. Thus the browser’s XPath did not match the structure used by Web::Scraper, and caused Web::Scraper to miss the desired content.
The solution was easy; strip out the tbody tags and Web::Scraper returns to working as advertised.
With this problem overcome, the project is already looking helpful.
This afternoon we visited Melbourne’s Docklands to see the Japanese Summer Festival 2010 (メルボルン夏祭り2010開催). I had fun capturing and editing together some of the summer dance performance.
Once again this short film was taken on a Canon SX200IS and edited with iMovie on Mac OS X. I continue to be impressed with the quality of the footage from a point-and-shoot Canon. iMovie’s stabilisation feature has been great for making more of my shaky footage useful.
I am no fan of Certificate Authorities (CA) but they seem necessary to work with in order to offer secure services. Certificate Authorities are the organisations that deal with certificates needed for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connections – the connections in your browser that show a padlock.
Early morning view from Queen Victoria Market, Melbourne
Thus, I was delighted to find StartSSL‘s offerings. The prices are good and the service has been great.
I had trouble getting the sign up process working with Safari 4 on Mac OS X, and needed help to rectify the resulting problems. Within an hour or two all was put right and DssW’s Reseller site now has a new SSL certificate.
I experienced problems when setting up the site’s authentication certificate and keys. Keychain appeared to get confused at some stage and I was left locked out of my original account.
If you decide to try StartSSL from Mac OS X, I recommend using FireFox. I found Safari’s tight integration with Keychain to be counter productive. FireFox avoided Keychain’s problems and gave me control over where the keys and certificates ended up.
Ultimately, I want DssW’s keys and certificates stored in separate keychains or files, and not lumped into my personal login keychain.
Today saw the Chinese New Year celebrated in Melbourne. Megan and I found ourselves in the crowds watching the performers and doing our best to keep out of the exploding fire cracker debris.
Once again the film was shot with our point and shoot Canon and edited in iMovie. This film is longer than any of my previous films. I wanted to keep in as much of the performance as feasible to give an idea of the build up to the fire crackers.
26th January is Australia Day; Australia’s national day. Megan and I spent the day out and about exploring various events around the city. We stumbled upon entertainers and entertainment in most of the city parks we visited.
Many dressed up and were decked with Australian flags and national pride.
All dressed up for Australia Day
Government House, Victoria, was open for part of the day. The queues to get in were long and slow moving. It is a shame this property is not open more often.
Queues waiting outside Government House, Victoria
The Australia Day People’s Parade floats ranged from marching bands to exhibits of the surreal.
Megan and I ventured out to Docklands, Melbourne, Australia, for the New Year’s Eve fireworks.
The day’s temperatures reached 37°C and moments before the family session of fireworks started, the predicted storm rolled in. The lightning, rain, and wind put on a show to complement the fireworks.
Storms clouds gathering over Melbourne
I managed another couple of film experiments over New Year’s Eve. Both films where taken on our little point and shoot Canon. My goal with these edits was to publish as quickly as possible. Both films took less than one hour from importing into iMovie to publishing on YouTube; a fun challenge that turned out well.
Melbourne’s fireworks are divided into two. The first session, at 9:15 pm, is for families.
We made gingerbread snowflakes this afternoon. Quick, easy, and fun. Making gingerbread biscuits in the shape of snowflakes is set to become a family Christmas tradition.
Embedded below is a film showing a little of Charlie and Rebecca’s wedding celebration. Charlie’s family is Lebanese, and the celebrations followed Lebanese traditions.
The music and dancing was loud, fun, and fast. Early in the evening it quickly became apparent that still photographs could not capture the moment.
During the celebrations and entertainment, I switched between filming and experimenting with various still settings on our point and shoot camera.
I came away with approximately 14 minutes of HD film footage, weighing in at 2.64 GB. The quality is acceptable given the lighting. The sound is terrible, but that should be expected; the camera’s microphone is mono.
Editing an HD film in iMovie on Mac OS X
The film was edited using iMovie. Films like this benefit from being short, closely cut, affairs. I had fun cutting and trimming footage. The process gave me a little insight into just how challenging a professional editor’s role can be.
Canon PowerShot SX200 IS
The camera is a Canon PowerShot SX200 IS. I can highly recommend this camera. It is small enough to carry around, not too expensive, and is capable of taking great shots.
I continue to miss the fresh bread from our time in Lyon. Rather than bemoan the quality of our local offerings, we decided to return to making our own bread.
Freshly baked homemade bread.
I bought a bread maker many moons ago. The machine is a traditional Russell Hobbs model. Nothing fancy but capable of more than I immediately need. Since then prices have dropped, and Aldi is now selling a bread maker for 79 AUD. I suspect you could find an even less expensive model.
A loaf of freshly baked homemade bread.
A single loaf tended to get me through a week’s worth of lunches. I was single then, but even with two of us a dense loaf is enough for our working day lunches.
We are currently experimenting with soy and linseed variations. So far so good.
You know your efforts are making an impression when they appear in print.
All three of DssW’s Mac energy saving products appear in Joe Hutsko’s latest book: Green Gadgets for Dummies. This is the first time I have known my work to appear on a bookshop’s shelves, and it feels good.
